Tanner's Scheme (8 page)

“I don’t want you dead before I have the chance to fuck you myself.”

“And once you’ve fucked me?” She forced the words past gritted teeth. Going to bed with this man would be the ultimate mistake.

“Would once be enough?” He moved forward slowly.

And she didn’t like that. She could feel the air thinning, his very presence taking up the oxygen, almost leaving her lightheaded.

“You’re very confident.” Too confident, and she was weak. She could sense her body’s weakness to him and she hated it.

“Is it merely confidence?”

Scheme steeled herself for his touch, for his fingers as they touched her collarbone, moving slowly over the slight ridge and sending a rapid fire of response racing through her body.

“I won’t have sex with you.”

“Yes, you will. It’s just a matter of time.” His eyes gleamed with the knowledge.

“And you have all this time to waste? Don’t you have a job at Sanctuary, Mr. Reynolds? News releases to send out, press conferences to prepare for?”

“I’m on vacation. Sanctuary allows those, you know.” His hand cupped her neck, his fingers curling around her nape. “We’re not in the labs anymore, Scheme. No matter the attempts your father has made to have us returned there.”

“He doesn’t want your return, Tanner. He wants your death.”

His fingers tightened slightly at her statement as his unusual amber eyes stared directly into hers.

“How will it feel?” he asked her. “To get all sweaty and wet beneath one of the animals you’ve helped track? To feel my cock burying inside you. Taking you. Marking you. And I will mark you, Scheme. I’m going to come inside you so deep and so hard, you’ll never remember what it was like to lie with another man.”

It would feel like nothing she had ever known before. She knew it. Sensed it.

“I’m liable to puke,” she said and sighed, rolling her eyes at him as his narrowed on her. “That could get messy, Tanner.”

“Oh, we’re going to get messy all right,” he assured her, his smile tight. “Real messy, Scheme. But in ways you might not imagine.”

“No, Tanner.” Her hands slammed against his chest as he leaned forward. “Don’t do this.”

She could hear the desperation in her own voice, the fear.

“Why?”

His lips were close. Too close. The brush of them was like a whisper against her own, a heady temptation she had to fight to resist.

“Because you don’t really want me. You want to strike against me. Hurt me. That’s what the Council taught you.”

“Don’t.” His hand cupped over her mouth before she could say anything more. “The Council didn’t teach me to jack off watching you sleep in your bed. It didn’t teach me to shadow you, or to become bewitched by you. And it didn’t teach me to care if you lived or died. Until I find out the reasons for those anomalies, Scheme, you are stuck with me.”

He was snarling. Furious. She could see the flames of anger sparking alongside the lust in his eyes. And none of it made sense. Nothing should be there but killing rage. No emotion, no regret, and sure as hell no attempt to protect her.

“You watched me sleep?” She walked this edge of danger carefully.

“I watched you sleep, fuck, masturbate and stare out that damned skylight for almost ten years. Since the month you turned twenty, sugar,” he growled. “From the moment I figured out how to direct our fucking satellites where I wanted them, I’ve watched you.”

Watched her fuck. He had watched her each time she had brought a man to her bed, each time she had used her vibrator. She should be throwing up in disgust rather than creaming in excitement.

“Why are you doing this? Did Sanctuary somehow miss a psychopath in their ranks?” She jerked away from him, trying to hide her reaction as her fingers knotted in the towel. “Are you forgetting who I am, Tanner? Scheme Tallant. Remember me? General Cyrus Tallant’s daughter? His right hand. Breed killer.” She was pushing it and she knew it. Tempting her own death, and it wouldn’t be a painless death if Tanner were the one meting it out.

His nostrils flared, his eyes gleaming with predatory awareness as he advanced on her.

This was why she’d fought to avoid him throughout the years. Why she had made certain there wasn’t so much as a chance meeting until that stupid ball. It was in his eyes now, primal, primitive, the same hunger she had felt growing within herself throughout the years. The more she tracked him on the television, received reports about him, the more he had fascinated her.

“Are you forgetting how hot and wet you were in my hand?” he countered. “The feel of my fingers fucking you, stroking that tight little pussy until you came for me?”

He stopped stalking her, but only because her back met the stone wall and there was no place left for her to go.

“That was a mistake.” Oh yeah, big mistake. That was why every cell in her body was reaching out for him.
Good going, Scheme, just keep up the good fight there,
her inner voice of reason chided her.

“The mistake is in lying to me, pretty girl,” he growled, his eyes flashing with a dangerous mix of lust, danger and anger. “Now, we’ll assume the good general has decided his daughter is no better than his coyotes and you’ve just become a liability. So why stay?”

Ahh, the reasons. Just let her count them. Of course, it could take days.

“And go where?” she asked. “By the time I was strong enough to run, your people were free and many of them would have eagerly killed me if they had caught me. They would have hunted me. Just as my father would have hunted me.”

“You had enough information against him to turn evidence during the hearings in the Senate and secure your safety.”

Scheme gave him a droll stare. “I was twenty years old, and I was still fighting the conditioning Father had used to raise me. When you train a child rather than raise it, Tanner, you condition it to certain things. I was conditioned. By the time I had the strength to break away, it was too late. And I knew it. He would have never let me live. And he’ll be even more determined now to see me dead.”

To a point, it was the truth. Once she had found the strength to break her conditioning though, the hatred had been all she lived for. It was then that she had secretly met with Jonas Wyatt and made her bargain. In exchange for her complete safety when the time came, she would help him bring her father down. He had enough information now. And she had more that she had held back for insurance when that time came. She could have waited. She could have tried to gain the last vital pieces of information that she needed to access the inner sanctum of the Genetics Council, but her time had run out.

If she didn’t get away from him soon and get to Jonas, then it would be too late for the pride leader’s son. And if that happened, then the Breeds world would quickly go to hell in a handbasket. Because nothing would restrain their rage then.

Her time had run out. And Tanner was deceptive enough, merciless enough, that he could be trying to gain her trust for one reason only. To gain the information her father’s agent had sent, the location of the first Leo and his child. That information couldn’t get into the wrong hands. Until she knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Tanner wasn’t her father’s spy, then she couldn’t trust. She couldn’t afford to ever trust her heart or her hunger again. Chaz had taught her better than that.

———

Her eyes were cold. The dark chocolate gaze was unemotional, uncaring. She could have been talking about the weather. But what he saw and what he could smell were two different things. His eyes saw a cold, hard shell. But he rarely depended on his eyes alone.

He could smell her pain, just as he could smell her fear and the anger she was tamping so deep inside her that it festered like an open wound.

She was fighting desperately to shut it all down. He could sense that. She had to obliterate all emotion to survive the darkness her father had placed inside her. And he couldn’t allow that. Smelling her fear made the animal inside him pace and thirst for blood. It did nothing to keep the man he was in control.

He knew all about conditioning and training. He had lived beneath Tallant’s guidelines for the first fifteen years of his life. As an animal. A weapon that had to be molded for effectiveness.

“Once you had the strength to break away, why was it too late?”

Her gaze flickered with shadows of deceit. He hated that deceit.

“I was already created,” she whispered then with a mocking smile, her gaze meeting his with icy knowledge. “It was too late. And it’s too late for this, Tanner. Go ahead and kill me. You’d be doing the world a favor. Wouldn’t you?”

“I won’t hurt you.” He forced the fury back and focused on his desire rather than his rage. On the hunger rather than the bleak memories he glimpsed in her eyes. “As a matter of fact, pretty girl…” He let his lips brush hers with the barest touch.

He was rewarded with an almost imperceptible intake of breath on her part. Her expression didn’t change, and neither did the look in her eyes, but her scent did. Once again, he could smell the heat of her need. It was there, sweet, soft, edging around the harsher scent of her forced detachment.

“As a matter of fact what?” Her curiosity was almost as legendary as her cold, unemotional facade.

“As a matter of fact, I intend to make you feel very, very good. I’m going to make you so damned hot you’ll burn both of us alive.”

“As I said, you’re a little overconfident, Breed.” The derision in her voice belied the scent of her passion. But it was the scent he went with. The scent that calmed the beast raging inside.

“Let’s see if that’s true.”

Nothing mattered but kissing her, holding her, sheltering her from the past that he wasn’t sure he could protect her from. And from the moment his lips took hers fully, he was lost in her. Not that he had expected anything less. Pleasure began to wrap around him, to emanate from her and lick his body with burning flames.

God, her kiss was good. She wasn’t hesitant; she reached for him, ate at his lips as eagerly as he ate hers. Slender arms twined around his neck; sharp nails scraped against his scalp and had a growl rumbling from his chest.

He had to touch her. Not just kiss her. Nothing mattered except this. Her body flush against his as he lifted her, her knees lifting, thighs parting, the towel falling away and her swollen breasts pressing into his T-shirt.

God yes, this was what he wanted. One arm wrapped around her back, the other moving to the firm mound of one tit. He had to taste her. Have her. Just one taste of those pretty, berry-ripe nipples.

He tore his lips from hers, scraped his teeth down the graceful column of her neck, then moved to the delectable fruit awaiting them.

And it was good. The growl that tore from his throat joined her cry as his lips covered the flushed, eager tip. His tongue lashed at it as he sucked it in deep, his teeth scraping tender flesh with lush eroticism as she shuddered against him.

“You taste like candy.” He would have winced at the gravelly sound of his voice if he’d had enough mind to do so.

“We can’t do this.”

He didn’t want to hear her denial, he wanted her to cry out his name, wanted her to beg him to fuck her.

That’s what he wanted to hear from her lips.

He nipped at the hard peak.

“Tanner.”

“Sweet nipples, perfect tits.” He groaned. “I could suck your tits for hours and never get enough.”

He went back to her, filling his senses with the feel of her, the taste of her, the heady scent of her wet pussy in the air.

“This is crazy.” Her voice was weak, but the scent of her lust—now, that was strong. Strong enough to intoxicate. Strong enough to mesmerize.

“Naw, darlin’, not crazy. Hot. Wicked. Never crazy.” He pressed closer between her thighs, feeling the heat of her pussy through his jeans, searing his dick.

“You’re forgetting who I am again,” she whimpered, but her head came forward, her lips pressing to his neck as every muscle in his body clenched in response.

“I know who you are, pretty girl.” His teeth scraped her other nipple as her responding cry sent a shock of satisfaction raging through him.

This was why she was still alive, why he couldn’t hurt her, could never harm her. For this pleasure, the taste of her, the heat of her. Nothing else. When he was finished, when he had sated himself with the need clawing at his insides, then he would pack her ass up and haul her to Sanctuary. Callan could do whatever the hell he wanted to with her then. If there was honor in her, Callan would find it.

“I can’t do this,” she whispered again as he continued to nip at one berry-ripe nipple while he bore her to the bed. “You don’t understand.”

“I understand my dick is so hard I’m going to come in my pants if I don’t get inside you,” he growled as he laid her back on the bed. “I understand you taste as sweet as sugar and you’re hotter than fire. What the hell else do I need to know?”

He leaned back, staring down at her pale face, her wide chocolate eyes. Sable hair spread out around her head like a silken fan, and excitement had flushed her breasts the color of a pale sunset.

She wasn’t exactly beautiful, except to him perhaps. Her irregular features—the little stubborn chin, pert nose and high cheekbones—and the faint Asian set of them combined to make her infinitely unique.

“I don’t want this, then.” Her head shook as her face mirrored some inner desperation.

“Don’t you, Scheme?” Before she could tighten her thighs to evade him, his hand slid between them, cupping the fiery mound of her pussy as his teeth snapped together at the heat filling his hand.

“You’re so fucking wet I could drown in you,” he said accusingly, using his fingers to part the swollen curves and find the honey beyond.

She jerked, shuddering as his finger slid along the narrow cleft to find her swollen clit.

“You’re close,” he growled. “I can smell your heat. Feel your pleasure growing. You’re so close to coming you’re having to fight it.”

“No.” She shook her head, fighting him, fighting the pleasure.

“No?” When she was this close? “Sweetheart, you’re so primed I could get you off with a few licks of my tongue. Wouldn’t you like that? To feel your hard little clit in my mouth, sucking you, tonguing you?”